Thursday, September 24, 2015

Pope Francis, Politics and the Blessed Peacemakers

While a number of strident public critics in corporate media and Washington politics have suggested that Pope Francis should stay out of politics and stop criticizing various US policies, it is rather impossible to separate the moral admonitions of
the Pope from politics. Politics determines policy and policy reflects the morality of societies. The pontiff's harshest
criticism seems reserved for capitalism, as it actually exists.He does not favor a political party.We often speak of capitalism as if it exists according
to the romanticized and now distorted images co opted from the writings of Adam
Smith and David Ricardo, men who wrote centuries ago and at a time when
corporations as we know them did not exist and when British and European “trade”
activity was based on mercantilism, artisanal entrepreneurs and tradesmen. When
Smith referred to the coincidentally benevolent “silent hand” effecting mutual
benefit amongst citizens, he was referring to these kinds of individuals and
not large mega corporations, which did not exist in his time. For the one exception, the East India Company, Smith was harshly critical of its
monopolistic power and brutal tactics in foreign lands.Many “conservatives” like to quote Adam Smith
but in a way that makes it apparent that they haven’t actually read his work,
or have done so selectively.

What the Pope seems to understand at a fundamental level is
that the thing we call capitalism today is anything but the world envisioned by
Smith, or that the “market” is in any way free and therefore benevolent or benign, by
intent or otherwise.When trade
agreements are negotiated in secret, out of public and even congressional view, how can we justly call this free trade?Free
for whom?When the three largest arms
producers in the world are US companies and virtually all of their profits are
attributable to US taxpayers, how is this free market capitalism?When these arms are sold to brutal regimes,
like the one in Egypt, in power by virtue of coup d’états, or Saudi Arabia, an
extremist fiefdom that promotes Wahhabism and genocide against Shia’s, how can this
be seen by the Pope as anything other than government sponsored brutality?

The Catholic Church, despite the story of Galileo, has a rather
decent record on the embrace of science in the modern era. This Pope recognizes
the urgency that overwhelming scientific evidence has brought to bear with
regard to global warming and climate change.When fossil fuel companies dominate energy markets, are given massive
taxpayer subsidies and licenses to drill on public lands, driving ever more CO2 into our only atmosphere, how is this rational
public policy? How does this serve the public trust and how is it remotely based on free market economics?

When the US surrounds Iran with 14 military bases and supplies
massive arms to its most bitter enemies, the Saudis (and Egypt, Oman, Qatar and
Bahrain), who have promoted Wahhabi and Salafist extremism intent on wiping out
Shia Islam, how is this furthering democracy, peace and brotherhood? How is it rational
and peace-seeking on the part of the US when all of the non-aligned nations of the world and
the P5+1 countries support the Iranian Multilateral Nuclear agreement and
accept the IAEA’s assessments (and the US Intelligence Estimate) and findings,
but the US Congress and influential “hawks” attempt to scuttle it, raising the
specter of war?

The Pope is from Latin America and knows its history
well.A question he might ask: why is it
that the US Congress and leading presidential candidates propose building
gargantuan border walls and the undertaking of massive deportations of illegal
immigrants, many of whom were refugees fleeing from Honduras where a
democratically elected government was overthrown by a military coup in
2009?How is it that the Latin American
countries, the European Union and the UN condemned the coup, but the US didn’t
and went even further and embraced the new military dictatorship, which then
undertook a violent campaign of oppression, driving farmers off of working land
and creating a massive refugee crisis, landing thousands at our southern border?

The Pope will know well the effects of the US War on Drugs in
Latin American countries.He sees our
massive demand for drugs and our poverty-generated markets for them and the
criminalization of non-violent, drug-related activities in the poorest neighborhoods
of the US, which has swelled our prisons, creating a new government-driven private,
(but not free) market for prison management, with taxpayers bearing the cost of
building the prisons and paying the tab for private contractors.We now jail 2.5 million people, the largest
number in absolute value terms in the world.The Pope may also question why the US, unilaterally and brutally, has
imposed an embargo on Cuba for over 50 years, while the rest of the world and
all of Latin America has condemned it.On this front, even large capitalist enterprises in the US have for
years called for the lifting of the embargo.

For those who wish to blame the GOP for all of these
tragedies – and they deserve plenty of blame – please do not allow the plank to
rest in your eye and ignore the complicity of the Democrats in all of
this.These are not new problems.They have developed over decades and across
presidential administrations and congresses and the unraveling of them will not
occur on our behalf by those in power whose campaign coffers are filled by
powerful special interest groups.We
are, in the literal sense, living in an empire and this Pope knows it.Private power is feeding at the public trough
and our government policies, unsurprisingly, reflect these interests.

If the Pope accomplishes one thing outside of the Catholic
Church proper, it may be that he opens our eyes to the human and moral
consequences of our government’s policies, its misuse of its citizens money by
spending 54 cents of every tax dollar on the military (that we know of), its
allowance of companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Apple and GE to store
billions of untaxed dollars abroad, the forcing of its citizens to underwrite
the moral hazard of ridiculously large banks and their executive’s bonuses in
the name of “liquidity,” increasing the already staggering wealth of those who make money on capital, but not of working people and the poor, its perpetual militarism, which has destabilized an
entire region of the world, bringing death and suffering to millions of
innocents and the creation of massive refugee crises, all the while having 25%
of the world’s prison population jailed inside of its borders and over a half a
million people living homeless on the streets if its great cities.

It is instructive that the Pope, when addressing today's joint session of Congress, offered these great Americans for thoughtful consideration: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. Blessed are the peacemakers."Here we have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade." - Pope Francis, Address to the joint session of Congress, September 24, 2015